Apple Ping

Asus PadFone/FonePad

Asus has made a few strange hybrid products in its time, and you can pick your poison deliberating between the FonePad and the PadFone. The FonePad is a 7-inch tablet that also doubles as a phone (a true phablet if there ever was one). Meanwhile, the PadFone Infinity (pictured) is a 5-inch LTE smartphone that becomes a 10.1-inch tablet when docked into the included PadFone Infinity Station.

Grace Digital Ecoxgear Ecoxbt

Grace Digital brings us this tongue-twister: Ecoxgear Ecoxbt. It's actually a decent little waterproof speaker for the money. Just don't try saying it five times fast -- or spelling it correctly every time you mention it in a product review.

iMuffs

Motorola Droid Xyboard

Motorola's got a thing for the letter X at the beginning of its tablet product names. We were OK with the Xoom, the first Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet to hit the market in 2011. However, Xyboard was a mistake, and sticking the Droid brand in front of it didn't make things any better.

Should Motorola have stuck with the Xoom brand? Probably, and the irony is that overseas the Xyboard was referred to as the Xoom 2. Whoops.

Editors' Rating

Nintendo Wii U

When we did the initial version of the roundup back in 2011, some CNET readers wanted the Wii to be on the list (as well as the iPad). Sure, it seemed like a silly name at launch, but it grew on people over time. Alas, the problem with Wii U is not that it sounds silly, but that it doesn't sound different enough from the original Wii, so a lot of people don't think of it as a totally new product.

Olympus mRobe MP3 player

The mRobe certainly ranks up there as one of the worst-named products of all time. Once again, we think something got lost in the Japanese translation. Supposedly, an Olympus executive liked the idea of a product that you could come home to and slip on like a robe. (There was some comfort factor involved, if memory serves correct.)

Qi inductive charging

Chinese for "life force," Qi is pronounced "chee." It's also a new inductive charging standard developed by the Wireless Power Consortium (it allows you to charge a device by simply laying it on a "transmission" pad). In theory it might seem like a good marketing ploy to name something with a term that requires a phonetic English translation, but in practice, it isn't.
Note: More Qi-enabled phones are supposed arrive this year, but Qi has been slow to take off. HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola Mobility, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony are working with the standard.

Qwikster

Netflix's sudden plan to split the company in two and change the name of its DVD delivery service to Qwikster didn't go over so well, and the company quickly nixed the name and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

While it may be a little hard to separate the name from the ill-conceived launch, any way you slice it, Qwikster just feels off -- and not in a good way.

Sony Rolly

Sony's break-dancing Bluetooth speaker, the Rolly, is pretty amusing to watch the first 10 times you see it in action. As a name, the Rolly isn't as bad as some on the list, but it has never been quite clear how to pronounce it. (Is it Roll-y or Rollie, like Rollie Fingers?)

TrekStor iBeat Blaxx

There have been lots of poorly named MP3 players over the years. (Samsung Yepp, anyone?) However, TrekStor's iBeat Blaxx may go down in history as one the most unfortunately named tech products of all time after people accused the product of being racist.

Shortly after it launched, TrekStor CTO Gil Szmigiel, apologized for the misunderstanding and renamed the product the TrekStor Blaxx.